Remember
all that furor last fall about "venom cock?"It's erupted again, this time because of
a somewhat favorable review by Liz Henry in
Strange Horizons.
No, I haven't read the book, I've only read the extracts.
Still, I think it was a bit presumptuous on Ms. Henry's part to tell the folks who think the book blows
dragonsgoats that they're not sophisticated enough to read such a great piece of feminist dystopian literature. Oh, wait, it's not great literature,
it might even be kind of bad (scroll down and look for her long response where she mentions The Book of the New Sun). Talk about mixed messages.
For the whole hullabaloo, check out
emcitblog; Cheryl has
a pretty good bead on the review and
the resulting fallout.
I'm waiting to see the fallout when people start noticing that
The Library Journal included
Touched by Venom in their list of
2005's Best Genre Fiction. So far, I've only seen one reference to that, and I had to verify it myself. I dug through the University's periodicals databases to find their original review from November, they closed with
With particular appeal to fans of the works of Jacqueline Carey and Terry Goodkind, this opening volume of a planned trilogy is highly recommended for most libraries. I also found
a similar glowing review in Publishers' Weekly. Gotta love Lexis-Nexis Academic.
(Oh, and for a laugh, check out
crevette's thoroughly snarky and rotten
review of Touched by Venom. I dare you to make it through the whole thing. It's a glorious rant, bucking frilliant.)